Excerpt from The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Can you grow happiness?" I asked.

"You can grow anything. Just like potatoes," Fabienne said.

I thought she would have given a better answer. Growing happiness on the top of a maypole, or in a wren's nest, or between two rocks in a creek. Happiness should not be dirt-colored and hidden underground. Even apples on a branch would be better suited to be called happiness than apples in the earth. Though if happiness were like apples, I thought, it would be quite ordinary and uninteresting.

"You don't believe me?" Fabienne said. "I have an idea. We grow your happiness as beet and mine as potato. If one crop fails, we still have the other. We won't be starved."

"What if both fail?" I asked.

"We'll become butchers."

Such were the conversations we often had then, nonsense to the world, but the world, we already knew, was full of nonsense. We might as well amuse ourselves with our own nonsense. If the thumb on the left hand got crushed under a hammer, would the thumb on the right feel anything? Why did god never think of giving people ear-lids, so we could close our ears as we shut our eyes at bedtime, or anytime when we were not in the mood for the chattering of the world? If the two of us prayed with equal seriousness but with the opposite requests—dear god, please let tomorrow be a sunny day; dear god, please let tomorrow be an overcast day—how did he decide which prayer he should honor?

Fabienne loved making nonsense about god. She claimed she believed in god, though what she meant, I thought, was that she believed in a god that was always available for her to mock. I did not know if I believed in god—my father was an atheist and my mother was the opposite of an atheist. If I had been closer to one or the other, it would be easier for me to choose. But I was close only to Fabienne. Perturbatrice of god, she called herself, and said I was one, too, because I was always on her side. In that sense we were not atheists. You had to believe that god existed so you could make mischief and upend his plans.

"If we can grow happiness, can we also grow misery?" I asked her.

"Do you grow thistles or ragworts?" Fabienne said.

"Do you mean misery grows by itself, like thistles and ragworts?"

"Or by God," Fabienne said. "Who knows?"

"But happiness, can it grow by itself?"

"What do you think?"

"I think happiness should be like thistles and ragworts. Misery should be like exotic orchids."

"Only an idiot would believe that, Agnès," Fabienne said. "But we already know you're an idiot."

Excerpted from The Book of Goose by Zhuqing Li. Copyright © 2022 by Zhuqing Li. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.